Breaking the Sword

A Tale Worth Telling (IV)

Tristram, for his part, was trying very hard to master his impatience as one of the gate guards patted him down for concealed weapons. Bad enough to be called to meet with the city's cruelest crime boss and taken for an hour-long tour of the worst section of the slum. He wished he could turn to communicate his plan of attack to Elyse, but Dradogan was keeping a sharp eye on him as the guard subjected him to this humiliation. He couldn't be certain she'd be able to read his hand signals anyway.

"He's clean," the guard declared at last, straightening and stepping back to his post at the side of the gate.

"Thank you ever so," Tristram snarked. "Normally I have to pay a hefty sum in the Lower Market for handling like that."

The guard's suggestion of the handling his mother got regularly followed Tristram up the grand front stairs of the Baron's mansion. There, Dradogan showed him the first small piece of courtesy in their short and unhappy acquaintance by holding the door open for him. Tristram chalked up this departure from his usual manner to the presence of the disapproving man standing behind Dradogan in butler's livery.

"May I take your cloak, sir?" the butler said pompously, literally over Dradogan's head.

"Thank you," Tristram responded, shrugging out of the cloak that had really been to heavy for the heat anyway.

The butler took the article and folded it over his arm with all the care appropriate to the Baron's equal, rather than his debtor. Tristram could see Dradogan was near hopping with impatience at these niceties, but the butler shot the enforcer a reproving look before saying to Tristram, "If you'll just follow me, sir."

Dradogan was left on the front mat with his escort job stolen out from under him. Tristram felt a surge of righteous triumph: more than once the enforcer had thrown him out of dice or card halls just because he didn't like some of the bard's wittier rhymes.

Tristram followed the butler through a maze of hallways and anterooms and into a spacious formal dining room. The table was long enough to accommodate sixteen comfortably, but  a lone man sat at its head on the far side of the room. Somehow the vaulted ceiling and empty chairs did nothing to dwarf him. This was the Braigh Street Baron, a powerfully built man in his late fifties who deserved every part and more of his reputation for ruthlessness in business and personal matters alike.

Tristram swallowed hard, then stepped forward with his winsomest smile. The Baron was working in his ledger and seemed prepared to make Tristram wait a good long while. The butler had bowed out of the room behind the bard with all the professionalism of his position. Tristram, for his part, had been often subject in his youth to the power game of making others await one's leisure; he refused to fall into the trap of impatience.

So he waited on the edge of the Baron's notice for what did indeed turn out to be a good long while. Tristram's face began to hurt from maintaining his smile. At last the Baron closed the ledger and gave the bard his full attention. Tristram forced himself to stare right back into the other man's sharp blue eyes.

"I underestimated you, Master Ilestik," the Baron began.

Tristram shifted his feet. "Oh?"

"I thought you were incapable of being silent so long."

"Where fools speak, the wise man only listens."

"And what do you hear?"

Tristram blinked. Whatever the Baron's reasons for summoning him, he was not behaving as someone finalizing a contract with a debtor. If anything, his tone was conversational, as if he were truly only interested in what Tristram heard through wisdom's voice.